Photo manipulation software is used to change features of a photograph or, in some cases, other types of graphics, such as logos or text graphics.
Images might be manipulated for fun, aesthetics, or to improve the appearance of a subject on a digital photo. Photos might be manipulated to deceive the viewer, as a prank, for propaganda purposes, or other reasons. Sometimes photo manipulation applications are used simply to remove acne or wrinkles from a photo, to remove background objects that distract from the central subject.
Often known as photoshopping, for the Adobe Photoshop product often used to manipulate photos, image manipulation software has eroded trust in photographs. Sayings such as "a photo is worth a thousand words" and "the camera never lies" were generally accepted by the public not so long ago, but photos can't simply be trusted anymore, as even the mainstream media has been guilty of digitally editing photos for various reasons. Up to twenty percent of World Press Photo entries that made it to the penultimate round of the contest were disqualified because of photo manipulation.
Within the glamour industry, photo manipulation is used to alter model's appearances in various ways, such as enhancing the shape of the model's body, skin complexion, or hair color, as well as the removal of blemishes, whitening teeth, and so on.
Not only is software used by the media and other professionals, but several programs have been designed for common usage in social media photos, allowing people to alter photos that they wish to post online.
The focus of this category is on software used to manipulate or enhance photos or other images.
Recommended Resources
Available for Windows, fotoWORKS is a free software download, designed for photo editing, and featuring an intuitive user interface, intended by use without a training period, although professionals may appreciate the speed in which modifications can be made. The program features several photo editing features, which are highlighted here. The program may be downloaded from the site, which also includes user reviews, screenshots, and tutorials.
http://www.fotoworks.org/
Released under the terms of the MIT License, GraphicsMagick is a fork of ImageMagick, breaking off due to differences of opinion among the developers. In addition to the programming language APIs available in ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick also includes a Tcl API known as TclMagick. The open-source software is used by several websites to process uploaded photographs. Project information, program and source downloads, and program interfaces are highlighted.
http://www.graphicsmagick.org/
Available through a free and open-source ImageMagick License, ImageMagick is a software suite that provides a variety of image creation and editing functions, supporting more than a hundred image formats, including GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, TIFF, SVG, and WebP. Versions of the software are available for the Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android platforms. Its features and capabilities are defined, along with descriptions for each command-line tool, and support options.
https://imagemagick.org/
From Anthropics, the developers of PortraitPro, LandscapePro is designed for editing landscape photographs, including selection tools for manipulating sky, water, mountains, grass, plants, trees, buildings, rocks, people, animals, objects, the ground, metal, sand, snow, bridges, waterfalls, and sky reflection. Other features include sky replacements and lighting brushes. A free trial is available, and it is available for purchase in three editions. Special offers may also be available.
https://www.anthropics.com/landscapepro/
Hosted on GitHub, Libvips is a demand-driven, horizontally-threaded image processing library that is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, and available for most Linux distributions, macOS, and Windows. The program includes about three hundred operations, numeric formats, and image formats, including Analyze, CSV, DeepZoom, FITS, HDR, GIF, JPEG, Matlab, NIfTI, OpenEXR, OpenSlide, PDF, PNG, PPM, SVG, TIFF, and WebP, and can load images from ImageMagick.
https://libvips.github.io/libvips/
Designed for Microsoft Windows, PhotoELF provides features for photo editing, enhancing, cropping, and printing, allowing the printing of up to 144 different photos on one page, including any desired size, batch printing, duplicates, digital compression, and photo printing templates. Text and captions may be printed on the photo, and photos may be made into calendars. A full list of features is published to the site, along with screenshots The software may be purchased online.
http://www.photoelf.net/
Also known as Portrait Professional, PortraitPro is a portrait image enhancement software for the macOS and Windows platforms. Developed by Anthropics Technology, its line of products includes PortraitPro, PortraitPro Studio, and PortraitPro Studio Max. Rather than depending entirely on brushes, PortraitPro detects faces in each image opened, and applies automatic retouching, with further transformations available through sliders or brushes. Other Anthropics products are also highlighted.
https://www.anthropics.com/portraitpro/
Created in 2006, Rawstudio is a standalone software program designed to read and manipulate images from digital cameras in raw image formats. Available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Rawstudio is available for FreeBSD and various Linux distributions. A feature list for the software is posted to the site, along with screenshots, hardware requirements, development notes, and other issues. References to the software in media are cited.
https://rawstudio.org/
Scilab Image Processing Toolbox
The SIP toolbox is free and open-source software, available through the terms of the GNU General Public License. The software is used to handle imaging tasks, such as filtering, blurring, edge detection, thresholding, histogram manipulation, segmentation, mathematical morphology, and color imaging processing. Its features are highlighted on the site, which includes development notes, screenshots, download links, and user documentation.
http://siptoolbox.sourceforge.net/
